After you watch this you'll really wish GGG could have afforded a commercial game engine .

I found this game developer's game engine diary:

World of Warships Developer Diaries #8. Game Engine

Once you watch this you will know just how massively better the commercial game engines are over GGG's home rolled one. Even knowing GGG's history and all as a financially struggling garage game startup and getting PoE to the state it is today (compared to alpha PoE) doesn't help when your fps tanks in complex battles. I was finally able to solve my own framerate problems but it still makes me think "damn, if only GGG could have afforded... or if only the commercial game engine companies had a cheap way to licence their game engine back in 2005". Oh well, here's hoping PoE 2 delivers even more quality of play. Forever keep raising the QoP bar GGG, even if it's just for solo play.

with ur 2 supporter packs ggg will never have the money for a better engine

commercial engines are frequently not better, its almost like they are designed for a specific purpose then developers use it as a framework to build their game in the best way possible.

The problem is when people with no development knowledge try to have some based on a wikipedia article and a pcgamer subscription. Game engines are tools you find the one that fits your requirements and use it to the best of your abilities it isn't like buying an engine from Mercedes F1 instead of GM.

Now that isn't to say give them a pass for many failures and bottlenecks we suffer as players, the Betrayal lag was a real killer for example and I know many struggled with the ground effects (though i personally never had trouble in that regard).

Would those problem exist on a different engine? Probably not, but the idea you wouldn't have a bunch of different problems is extremely naive we'd just have full system crashes whenever you encountered a divine shrine and far less content due to increased development times.

Note my entire response here isn't really disagreeing with anything you said aside from a commercial engine would be vastly better than GGG's internal one, that as a blanket statement is simply wrong. You can make cost/benefit analysis for different platforms but it isn't as easy as Unreal Engine LUL ynobuy

"

Latze wrote:

with ur 2 supporter packs ggg will never have the money for a better engine

Just because he's only displaying 2 supporter packs doesn't mean he has bought only 2. You shouldn't make assumptions like that.

"

Arrowneous wrote:

World of Warships Developer Diaries #8. Game Engine

One issue with invoking Wargaming.net is that their cash cow is *spectacularly* pay to win. Completely different financial model to PoE's.

Another issue is GGG was never a 'struggling garage game startup'. It had decent support from the get-go ('we have rich friends', as Chris put it in the early Gamingplanet interview) and received decent support from then onward (I'd know). I've seen struggling startups come and go and that label never applied to GGG. Most of its struggles were internal. GGG has never faced stiff competition. It has never seen large drop-offs of support pack sales. And its biggest problems have been largely self-inflicted, such as the disastrous Garena ventures. Selling out to Tencent was easily the Best Ending for the New Zealand gaming studio GGG. Eaaaasily.

Although creating their own engine probably started as a financial decision, I suspect it was a matter of pride and familiarity that has seen them continue to use it. Convenience aside, there are some major pitfalls when you use a third party engine and you're not very familiar with it. I don't know how well PoE's unique complexity would work with an existing engine.

That all said, I don't think this is an issue of engine at all so much as what you do with it. GGG just got way too ambitious and pushed their engine to do things it simply can't do well, probably never will do well. So the seemingly logical response is, 'get a better engine'. But 'better' isn't a simple issue when you've been using the same engine for years. When you've built around it, ensconcing it in addition after addition. It's like saying to a 60 year old with a bum ticker who insists on sprinting everywhere, 'just get a new body' when the more obvious solution is, y'know, maybe know your limits and stop acting like you're a teenager.

And this, kids, is why most developers make actual sequels instead of 'evolving' their first game into some ghoulish chimeric abomination. PoE is like a geriatric version of the Six Million Dollar Man.

As for PoE '2', it baffles me why people are holding out for it being some sort of miraculous panacea to everything wrong with the game now. It's going to be the same engine, modified incrementally rather than suddenly (it's already begun, haven't you noticed?). I'm sure they'll do their best to streamline it, upgrade it, improve it, but there's only so much of that you can do with a home-made engine originally designed for a vehicle that might carry 100k people moving at 100km/h...but is now somehow expected to carry a million people at the speed of sound.

"

Draegnarrr wrote:

commercial engines are frequently not better, its almost like they are designed for a specific purpose then developers use it as a framework to build their game in the best way possible.

Indeed.

Or worse, when you're forced to use someone else's engine made to do something completely different that you know absolutely nothing about, and have no support for:

"

“Frostbite is full of razor blades,” one former BioWare employee told me a few weeks ago, aptly summing up the feelings of perhaps hundreds of game developers who have worked at Electronic Arts over the past few years.

Frostbite is a video game engine, or a suite of technology that is used to make a game. Created by the EA-owned Swedish studio DICE in order to make Battlefield shooters, the Frostbite engine became ubiquitous across Electronic Arts this past decade thanks to an initiative led by former executive Patrick Söderlund to get all of its studios on the same technology. (By using Frostbite rather than a third-party engine like Unreal, those studios could share knowledge and save a whole lot of money in licensing fees.) BioWare first shifted to Frostbite for Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2011, which caused massive problems for that team. Many of the features those developers had taken for granted in previous engines, like a save-load system and a third-person camera, simply did not exist in Frostbite, which meant that the Inquisition team had to build them all from scratch. Mass Effect: Andromeda ran into similar issues. Surely the third time would be the charm?

As it turned out, Anthem was not the charm. Using Frostbite to build an online-only action game, which BioWare had never done before, led to a host of new problems for BioWare’s designers, artists, and programmers. “Frostbite is like an in-house engine with all the problems that entails—it’s poorly documented, hacked together, and so on—with all the problems of an externally sourced engine,” said one former BioWare employee. “Nobody you actually work with designed it, so you don’t know why this thing works the way it does, why this is named the way it is.”

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/02/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong/

"

Latze wrote:

with ur 2 supporter packs ggg will never have the money for a better engine

Of course I'm not a big financial supporter as some players are with all the tags. Until just recently (February 2020) I was constantly plagued with massive framerate stuttering and fps crashes. For example, Metamorph creatures would routinely cause bad stuttering making it a very rippy fight because the attacking/kiting was extremely difficult to do smoothly. Now that I have learned when I upgraded to Windows 10 Pro (same hardware) that it was a weird code thread scheduling timing problem with Windows 7 OS foobar-ing my PoE framerates (never could get above 60 fps and usually not above 50) even though every other game ran super smooth on my gaming rig. Anyway, now that I get 200 fps and don't drop below 100 fps in any battle playing and now PoE is night/day better so I would be inclined to financially support GGG but:

1. I'm a filthy casual from day one in Dec. 2012 and GGG has never/ever fixed trade-chat so
    that we can sell anything unless logged in and chained to our gaming rig.
    (selling is really only viable for streamers/no-lifers)
2. PoE is shit for party play.
3. GGG was of 0 help in solving my framerate problems. They never provide good tech support.
    GGG misrepresents the hardware requirements necessary to get good QoP. You really need
    an 8 core/16 thread cpu to keep your fps from crashing in heavy action. Obviously that would
    keep many newbies from trying PoE as they would think they couldn't get good QoP and
    they'd be right.
4. GGG have decided that too many elite players are racing to 100 fast every league so starting
    in Metamorph and especially Delirium league the boss hp and dps is being substantially
    raised (and probably will continue to do so in future leagues as well do to level 100 reached
    in < 72 hours by a few elite players. That is pretty much wrecking my filthy casual play
    of PoE and pushing me out nearly completely this league.
5. Tired of always playing a beta quality game every 3 months. Getting a new league every 3
    months sounds great but the price of that is an unstable game with massive balance problems
    all the time (over-tuned league mechanics challenges and game breaking builds for the
    elite players). All this just further pushes casuals out. Of course "it's their game and GGG
    can make it any way they want to" and all but I can't support a game I really like now
    that my framerate problem is history only to get wrecked by more and more one-shots.
    The "git gud or git out" mentality of hardcore and elite players has pushed me out as GGG
    keeps raising the difficulty bar on me. I fully understand that GGG wants to go in that
    direction and make PoE for the extreme hardcore arpg players and I do respect that
    thinking but that means I can't justify supporting a game (no matter how much I like it)
    if I'm not playing it.

Comparing ARPG game to shit like Word of Tanks/Warship.

You wot m8.

"

Latze wrote:

with ur 2 supporter packs ggg will never have the money for a better engine

F2P is the business model GGG chose. If a player decides that supporter packs are overpriced, offer poor value or simply don't offer anything that a player wants then that's on GGG (same for MTX). I don't buy supporter packs for all the above reasons nor do I feel compelled that it is my duty to do so because I play the game. I have bought stash tabs and feel as an entertainment expense it has been well worth it. I would happily support the game as a subscription model.

We don't need no steenking badges!

Another one of these.

PoE has a lot of weaknesses. We all know that. We experience them daily. What most of us have no clue about, is where these weaknesses come from. It's VERY easy to critique the engine, without having a clue about engines - or coding - at all.

I wish - for once - that someone critiquing the engine, and scream for a "commercial engine" would educate us. And as you, Arrowneous, seem to know, I will ask you - and I demand answers.

1) Which of PoE's weaknesses are based on the engine, and not asset implementation?

2) Is it the client side or the server side that is the bottle neck?

3) What (exactly) would Cryengine do better? What is its strength compared to PoE's engine? What kind of improvements would we see? In what areas?

4) What (exactly) would Unreal do better? What is its strength compared to PoE's engine? What kind of improvements would we see? In what areas?

5) We all know the IMMENSE amount of calculation that the server side has to calculate each second. What examples do we have of other engines doing the same amount of calculations?

Look, I don't doubt that other engines could do a fine job. But coming from somebody who just upgraded to a modern OS and got surprised about better performance, I seriously doubt the substance here. I don't think you know any more than me, and based on that, crying out for a new engine is too easy. Of course, unless you answer my questions :)

Have a nice day.

Phrazz your response is lovely <3